BLOG 505

Blog 505

We have had a mixed week weather-wise but it has still given me a pleasing amount of time in my room which is good. The garden is more or less looking after itself apart from a bit of weeding and some gentle cutting back. My husband spends masses of time on his little tractor mower to keep on top of the flourishing grass which in turn gives me even more space! (We used to have the paddock cut by a local farmer for his own use, but he decided early on that the quantity produced wasn’t worth his while!) So, with the relaxation of lockdown in Wales dragging behind the rest of the country, time is still very much my own and I can spend it just how I prefer to!

So this week I continued to concentrate on the Contemporary Sampler that I started last week. This involved drafting the sampler quilt blocks onto graph paper initially and that was straight forward enough. So far, so good! The problem was that my roll of graph paper was in Metric and all my rulers for rotary cutting were in Imperial!! So this slowed down progress considerably as I had to convert from one to another and use the 1/8^Th and 1/16^Th marks on these rulers!

Patterns

I also had to paint more fusible with watered down acrylic paint and leave it to dry completely.

Painted fusible

And then it was a case of cutting my collection of colourful polyesters into the required shapes for the various blocks. The design was then over-laid with the painted fusible so that the layer of sheers could be added. I continued adding the sheers haphazardly but also took into account the lightness and darkness of the various patterns.

Log cabin (and fusible)

Sheers

Log cabin and sheers

Ohio Star and sheers

The block was then put under the sewing machine and I used a black cotton thread and two of the decorative stitch patterns on my machine to define the block and the individual pattern shapes.

Stitching

The Sampler quilt continues to develop pleasingly but just sometimes you need to do some motorway driving with your sewing machine … at east this girl does! So I chose some fabric for a Linus quilt, cut some squares and zoomed them under the sewing machine, foot down. It is a good way of using up bits and pieces of threads from the bobbins and I use a smaller stitch length so that the seams are firm from using different weights of thread.

Linus squares

Linus sewing

Linus construction

Spools (bits and pieces)